Member-only story
The Attempt to Grow a Covid-19 Vaccine in Plants
In the race to find a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine, researchers around the world are deploying a wide range of vaccine-making strategies, from the traditional to the theoretical. As science journalist Leslie Nemo writes in Future Human, a brand-new publication from Medium about the science shaping the survival of humanity, a small group of scientists is working with one particularly unusual method: They’re trying to grow vaccines in plants.
Tried-and-true methods for making vaccines involve infecting mammalian cells or chicken eggs with a virus, waiting for the viral particles to replicate, then harvesting them. Doing so can be expensive, time-consuming, and occasionally risky. Growing the vaccines in plants, writes Nemo, could solve all of those issues — if scientists can get it to work. Though researchers have been working on this technology for 30 years, so far there haven’t been any plant-based vaccines brought to market. There’s reason to think that could change.
In August, senior staff writer Emily Mullin wrote about another a similarly outside-the-box approach to vaccine making that involved delivering a set of genetic instructions to cells to teach them how to make a vaccine. These “genetic vaccines” have been in the works…
